‘And Mr Liu, the owner, has he been told anything?’
‘Only that someone had a bad miscarriage, there was an accident with the sink and that I botched the cleaning. God I hate that! I hate lies. Why Mum, is the world built on lies? Why can’t people be honourable, fair and reasonable?’
We were wrapped in a cocoon of two, which now had to break again and spill us out because we had arrived at the relative’s house with the Panjshir galloping along beside it like wild white horses. We crossed a couple of yards and passed through low stone walls without noticing anything except where to put our feet.
The bodyguard has climbed up onto the roof. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing, because it advertises our presence and potentially spreads messages to people further away: Important Personage on Premises. But there isn’t time for worry, only time to be with my son.
Eli has been travelling abroad with the important personage. They’ve been in one of the Gulf States – not allowed to say which one – talking with former leaders of the Taliban and trying to gauge what demands are going to come the way of Afghanistan before a peace accord can be signed. Because Eli now has a large compendium of knowledge about the country and has all kinds of contacts, he is able to put people in touch with those they could not meet under regular circumstances.
‘But why is it necessary for the Taliban to be at the peace table at all?’ I ask as we take off our shoes and progress into a spacious foyer with a large, ornate fountain in the centre at which we wash our hands. Neatly dressed and turbaned serving men hand out towels.
‘Gosh, quite a house, isn’t it?’ says Eli. We follow the rest of the party into a plain but commodious hall whose extensive windows give onto the river and we settle ourselves into a corner where the windows meet and there is a fresh breeze coming in. ‘The Taliban?’ he continues. ‘They’re part of the fabric of southern Afghanistan by now. They’re guerilla fighters and they’ve infiltrated deeply into the Pashtun regions. In that way they’re like the Viet Cong and can’t be defeated. They also make up the single largest political group among the Pashtuns. If they are not involved in the peace process, they’ll just keep up the sabotage and murder that have been their hallmarks since NATO came in. They’re very well armed and will never agree to an armistice so there’ll have to be local truces or something. We’re not sure how firm their support base is but sympathy for them is widespread in the south. I don’t know that too many of their sympathisers would also harbour and help them, but they’d follow them if they had significant military victories.
‘And then there’s Pakistan,’ he says, swiping up almonds from the entrée bowl at the low table before us and chucking them absently into his mouth. ‘The Taliban have formed a Pakistani branch and they are all over northern Pakistan, too. In the Swat Valley and places like that. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is often more theoretical than real and the Taliban are deeply involved in the border culture, so amelioration would be a better outcome for Pakistan than exclusion.’
‘You know a lot, my boy.’
‘I have to, Mum. Or someone has to. The West doesn’t understand this area as well as it might.’
‘But who are you collecting the information for and where does the money come from to keep yourself, Eli?’
I’ve made him squirm now. He sighs. ‘I was asked to set this last thing up by the UN. They paid me and I’ll get a lecture tour out of it. I’ll be talking in Geneva and Brussels and Paris and London and then I’ll be talking in the States to some congressmen. It’s all right Mum. I know it’s been really hard on you but I’ll soon be able to reimburse you for everything you’ve had to hand out.’
‘Well, it’s problematic, you know. Deeply problematic now. I am at the bottom of the barrel. The house is falling to bits and I’m going mad for want of space to work in.’
‘I know that, Mum. I’m very conscious of that. I can only say wait a little longer, just a little longer…’
‘I’ve already waited, honey. You can’t promise what you can’t give any more than I can live in expectation of plenty. I know that.’
‘I’m afraid it’s keep a low profile or be killed, Mum. Sometimes I think it would be easier to be killed.’
‘Oh don’t say that! It’s just as well you’ve always been a master of disguise, eh?’
‘Odd bunch, the Coretti family, and forced by our talents to live odd lives.’
‘Do you think anyone lives smooth, unworried, joyful lives, Eli?’
‘I’ve never met anyone who does,’ he says with his mouth full, and gobbling. He’s eaten all our hors d’oeuvre and I’ve had two nuts.
They have put on a large spread for our lunch. No sooner have we started one dish than another arrives. Eli and I are together in a corner of a great table at which there is much passing to-and-fro of specially prepared food. There is lamb, of course, okra and chicken and bread. Yoghurt and bolani. Lentils, salads…all the usual fare that there is at an Afghan table but lots of it and well prepared and there are the people of the house to wait on us. Eli eats as if new to it, so much so that I feel reassured in having told Dan that this is the life where everything alive has to eat something else that’s been alive.
Although the house is plain, it is on the scale of a baronial hall; maybe it works like a barony with Massoud’s family as the barons. It is hard to hear each other talk but most of the noise is coming from the VIP’s table, where the VIP is informing people of what he has been doing in the Gulf. He seems a little bit loud and boastful to me. ‘Yes,’ says Eli, between mouthfuls. ‘Sometimes people like him like to let off steam and blow their trumpets among potential supporters. I had to keep telling him to cool it when we were talking to the Taliban blokes: he was bursting out of himself with his own importance. It’s something you have to learn not to do, although you do get excited and almost everyone does it, especially politicians. They just can’t keep things to themselves until they’ve had gestation time. It’s one thing I’ve learned, Mum. You have to let information mature in the vat alongside everything else you know before you go making a hero of yourself. It’s better to lie as low as you can and never make a hero of yourself so you can develop a continuous picture and learn to predict. Guess it’s why there are secret police.’
‘There are other ways of drawing attention to yourself, dear, apart from boasting.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re obviously very hungry and unused to dining in high-falutin’ company.’
‘Still drinking, Mother?’ he taunts. This is the barrier we’re up against: I’m not allowed to have any wisdom of my own. He’s the bloke, I’m the bird and I’ve never yet been able to open the door to the legitimacy of my own thoughts in his adult presence. I can’t think how to do it here, in this dramatic and utterly extraordinary situation, so I ask. ‘Are there lots of secret police in Afghanistan?’
‘You bet. You would have been followed from the time you arrived.’
‘Who by?’
‘Government spies. They wouldn’t have wanted you to get into trouble – or to cause trouble, for that matter.’
‘How would I cause trouble?’
‘Photographing installations, that kind of thing.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’
‘And you’re followed?’
‘Sure. I’m well and truly known by now. I’ve had the third degree on my Taliban contacts. I’d be dead meat if I didn’t come and go frequently.’
‘Oh don’t say that!’
‘Don’t worry Mum, what’s the use of worrying? I know how to look like a local. I’m gone even when I’m there.’
‘Do you?’
‘Sure. I’ve even been a woman sometimes. I make a good woman. I’ve got tiny hands and feet. You did well there; they came from you.’
‘Believe me, you wouldn’t make a good woman.’
‘Why do you say that?’
If I say never mind the way he says it to me
, he’ll only take offence and we’ll argue and I can’t let that happen here, so I say instead, ‘You’re the wrong shape.’
‘Not wrong enough to be a standout. I’ve been a Sunni mullah – not a very good one, but good enough to hear the crap they go on with, particularly the guys in the south – they’d love a Taliban takeover and the proclamation of the Sunni Islamic State of Afghanistan. They’re all puffed up with their own selfimportance – and the people they control, the henchmen they want to send up north to gain control of northern provinces, they’re even more puffed up.’
‘What are their chances?’
‘Not great, but not absolutely negligible. Sometimes they manage to put in one of their boys, but the people up in this region, Kabul, Panjshir, hate them. What the conservative mullahs really want is for the Taliban to gain control of the Afghan Army.’
‘Will they?’
‘I don’t know. The army is getting better at behaving like a national army, but there’s a long way to go yet. As things stand, the Taliban would be defeated if they tried to overthrow the Afghan Army today. They haven’t got the firepower or the technical skill. They know they haven’t, too. The Taliban operate in a way similar to the Mafia. The Mafia were a great help to the Yanks in the Second World War and they could put themselves forward as a great help to them again in this situation. I reckon that would hinge on drugs; it wouldn’t involve the Pakistani Taliban, who are right into drugs trading, but the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar are dead against it. If the Yanks or the UN paid them to get rid of the crops in their bailiwick, they’d do it.’
‘I thought that the opium trade accounted for most of Afghanistan’s GDP.’
‘It does as things stand, but that’s probably about to change.’ He reaches across me to grab salad. ‘This country is sitting on huge deposits of rare metals. If they don’t develop the minerals industry themselves, you can bet your boots someone else will be in here doing it for them. If they do manage to capitalise on minerals, they’ll be able to pay their way for the first time in history. They’ll have to start from scratch, of course. They’ll have to import technocrats and train up their own. But if they succeed in doing that, there’ll be a bonanza.’
He eats absent-mindedly, dropping stuff on his clothes so that I reach over to blot his lap with tissues…He follows my hand, left and right, bemused.
‘But the completely insurmountable problems of the moment are Taliban zealotry and their abominable attitude to women. They don’t credit women with will and intellect,’ he says as I wipe his lap, ‘they equate them with prestige goods. Either a woman is worth something because of her birth into a desirable family, or because of her skill as a carpet maker or embroiderer or cook, or she is worth twelve sheep, like poor Samia. Or worse – she’s a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong and she’s punished to the point of wanting to die. I’ve seen some terrible things here. Once I saw a sixteen-year-old wife who’d had her tongue cut out by her husband for telling a lie. She wouldn’t even have been worldly wise enough to be able to concoct a decent lie…’ he pauses for a moment, mid-chew, and then shudders.
‘Oh that’s terrible!’ But of course, it’s just like Eli to tell me such a thing. He constantly buys me off with abysmal stories and the need to combat the dreadful things that happen. But I seem to pay for half the combat. If I keep on having to fork out there’ll be nothing left for me. He knows that but I’m always coughing up in the name of some greater goal.
‘But that’s the detail,’ he continues, almost as if advising himself. ‘You have to overcome the detail, curse it, put it aside. It used to enter my dreams and wreck my sleep, but not now. You have to stand up tall, Mum. High, but invisible. You have to look out over all the heads, count them and know that among them there are good people, right-minded people, people who will dare to be educated and dare to change things without reaching for the switch that turns off the lights and stops them from seeing. You have to locate those people in the anonymous crowd. You have to follow the chains of association until you find yourself in enemy territory but with a way out. Ariadne’s thread, as you used to teach me. I thank you for that. It would be a poor world without Ariadne’s thread.’
Well, that’s true. I always have stressed that. Without the thread you’re in the labyrinth forever, with the Minotaur’s wrath at your back: it’s just that all I can afford at the moment is Ariadne’s string and even that’s frayed.
Ariadne’s thread, he tells me, has taken him among Taliban high up in a plush hotel in the Gulf where everything works and the food is served on silver trays. Where there are smart phones and flat screen TVs as big as a wall. Where the swimming pools are made of marble and each one has a fountain far more elaborate than the one in the foyer here. Far, far from the recruiting grounds where people are so poor they sell themselves for a gun and some hope. ‘Imagine what the Taliban saw in that hotel,’ he says. ‘The sort of luxury they despise on one hand, certainly, but on the other, the fabulous communications – news and knowledge on tap, distances shrunk and goods and information at everyone’s fingertips. Those advantages they would envy and wish for themselves. If they had those things, I think it would be transformative. New information would have to seep into their consciousnesses. For instance, they would see that acceptance of women playing powerful parts in world affairs is widespread.
‘There is a mighty chasm as things stand. They are putting draconian demands on the peacebrokers. They’re insisting that Karzai and his clan are ousted and have nothing further to do with politics. They see Karzai not as an intermediate step towards a peaceful Afghanistan but as an archenemy.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘Well, one of Karzai’s brothers is reputed to be hugely involved in the drugs trade and there’s no knowing how corrupt that family really is. I guess they’re stacking up the wealth against the day when they’ll have to get out. They’re just like the old Romans, I guess – a quaestorship in Sicily and then pleasant banishment to an outer province with your ill-gotten gains. There aren’t too many saints. The women of Afghanistan often feel betrayed by the Karzai government but not for the same reasons that the Taliban do. Women of both sects think that the Shi’ite Ayatollah in the Upper House has too much power over the marriage laws. They don’t want Karzai to enact Shi’ite exemptions from Sunni legislation, like women having to agree to sex with their husbands on pain of not being fed.
‘The women politicians have won the case for the legal age for marriage to be set at sixteen for girls and eighteen for boys and they’ve won legislation against forced marriages. But those laws are widely flouted. They’re not properly policed. No one outside Kabul seems to adhere to the rights enshrined in the constitution. It’s very frustrating for them. The country is lagging way behind where their minds are. They’re educated women, of course, and as such they are still a small elite. Some of them had their education within Afghanistan, but most not. They’ve come back from places like Pakistan and the USA. They’re very vulnerable. If you want to live a long life, don’t be a female politician or journalist or policewoman in Afghanistan.’
‘Poor things,’ says the humble parent of the over-achiever, but I find myself listening in spite of myself. I’ll never get rich.
‘Yep. And even the rights they have won so far, which, when you hear them are considerable enough in words anyway, are likely to be ripped away by the Taliban, given half a chance. The Taliban are saying they won’t come to the negotiating table unless the constitution is discarded. They insist on being part of the rewrite, but if you ask me, the constitution as it stands is not too bad. It gives all citizens standing. It stipulates a certain number of women representatives in the Loya Jirga, more than the number of women politicians you’ll find in the House of Reps in Australia. The law runs according to moderate Sunni precepts and there’s some allowance made for the Shi’ite differences. But the Taliban want it all scrapped. My guess is they will refuse to sit down with women to do the business
of government.’
‘Is there a way around that, do you think?’
‘Well, they’re going to have to sit down with women or exclude themselves from the peace process if the Americans are involved and there aren’t going to be peace negotiations without the Americans. At least they’re coming to their senses about their ability to overrun the country. They can’t: they haven’t the military strength for a start and they certainly haven’t a skerrick of support in the northern provinces. I mean, up here, they’re hated. They’d never govern these people.
‘As far as the south’s concerned, they don’t want civil war – at least, not all-out civil war. They aren’t the only militia in the south. There’s Al Qaeda, and they’re not fans of Al Qaeda. They weren’t fans of 9/11.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘No. The Taliban – at least the ones who follow Mullah Omar – are not pan-Islamists like Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network. They want their own-style Islamic state in Afghanistan, that’s where their focus is. They don’t like heroin traffickers and so they’re only tolerant of the Haqqani network when it’s tactical to be so.’
The custard dessert has arrived. Eli woofs down one plateful and then reaches over my head for a second. ‘I wish you didn’t bolt your food,’ I say and he laughs.
‘I’m hungry, Mum.’
‘You’ve always had a weird pattern of eating: stuffing yourself, then starving. I was hoping you might develop regular habits one day.’
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